The Last Fight
by Vee An
Summary: As they learn to cope with Lexie's death and the fleeting images of the plane crash, the doctors finally take on the role of surgical attendings at Seattle Grace Hospital.
1. Chapter 1: The Arena

_We keep telling ourselves everything is going to be the last. The last day you're going to go without running, the last day you're going to procrastinate, the last time you're going to pine over the same guy, the last time you're going to romanticize about your idealistic future. It was always going to be the last; but it never is the last. We always think we have more time, but we don't have anything at all. When it finally hits you, you don't want to say things will be the "last" anymore. You don't think the last conversation will be the last conversation. You don't think that seeing someone's face would be the last time you'd ever see it again. There was always a next time. You'd always think you'd have more time._

Meredith Grey adjusted the collar of her pristine lab coat and exhaled before turning to the new interns that waited anxiously before her. Step by step, she slowly strolled across the room, her white sneakers squeaking against the newly waxed hardwood floors. She stared at them. Analyzed them. With her calculating, blue eyes, eyes that had such a remarkable, deep past they were almost void of emotion.  
She was dead inside. So dead, every reference to an accident, a trauma, a death, she was almost indifferent, as if the fragility of her mind was not really present at all, unlike Cristina Yang, who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  
Silent, Meredith took it all in. The light blue scrubs of the interns, their grinning faces on their hospital name tags, her navy blue attending scrubs.  
For seven years, she had been waiting for this moment. She had been waiting to become an excellent surgeon, to wear these navy scrubs, to finally be a Neurosurgery consult like her gifted husband, Derek Shepherd. So why was it that, despite the status she had gained after her board exams, she felt like she was in the same place a year ago? She still felt like the girl in the bar. She wanted to drown herself, to stop treading this flood brought upon Lexie Grey's death. She was still dark and twisty.  
She took a deep breath and began her speech, "Each of you comes here today, hopeful. Wanting in on the game. A month ago you were in med school being taught by doctors. Today, you are the doctors. The seven years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to the breaking point. Look around you – say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty, five of you will crack under the pressure, two of you will be asked to leave. This is your starting line. This is your arena. How well you play, that's up to you. Our former Chief, Dr. Webber, gave this speech to me, us, when we were just like you. His words stuck by me ever since. The hell you suffer from your residents, your peers, and your cases, will test your potential to become a surgeon. I fought. These three attendings that stand behind me, they fought. This is what Seattle Grace is all about – fighting. Fighting for your job, fighting for your patients' lives, fighting for your life."


	2. Chapter 2: Fine

Cristina obnoxiously bit into her apple, breaking the tension that loomed over the room. "Raise your hand if you're interested in cardio."  
A few of the scrawny, young interns raised their hands eagerly, as if expecting Cristina to congratulate them, approve them. Meredith almost smirked. They needed more than a shared specialty to get Cristina's approval.  
She rolled her eyes. "Then you're all working with Dr. Grey today. Abrams through Keating, you're with me. The rest of you are with Karev."  
One girl raised her hand. She was pretty. Innocent pretty. Like the kind of girl who just graduated high school. She almost looked like Lexie, with her large doe-eyes and short, brown hair. "What about Dr. Hottie over there?" she asked, giggling as she pointed to Jackson Avery. He was speaking intensely on his cell phone, pacing around the room in circles.  
More immature than Lexie ever was.

Meredith raised her eyebrows. "You're kidding, right? You're doing charts today," she said, handing her a stack of binders. "_Go_."  
"God, I hate interns," Cristina said under her breath, tossing the core of her apple into the nearest trash can.  
"We can hear you," a voice croaked from the back.  
Cristina scoffed. "I know, and I don't really care," she deadpanned.  
As if on cue, to save them from dealing with any of these adolescents, all of their pagers beeped simultaneously at their waists. The interns looked nervously at each other, as this was going to be their first call.  
"Alright, people, let's move!" Alex shouted, waving them over.  
They all sprinted to the emergency room. Meredith shoved her arms through the sleeves of her yellow gown as they formed a train, her tying Karev's gown, Cristina tying hers. She pulled her long, blonde hair into a ponytail and pulled on a pair of non-latex, surgical gloves.  
In a large group, like a migration of birds, they all waited outside the emergency room. This would be Meredith's first case since the accident. She exhaled slowly and closed her eyes, counting down from ten.  
_Ten...nine...eight...seven...six...five...four...three...two...one._  
She could feel her palms sweat underneath her gloves. She glanced at her interns, who were bouncing on their heels, anticipating their very first case. The wailing sirens reverberated in Cristina's ears.  
The ambulance pulled to an immediate stop.  
"Okay, stand back!" Cristina ordered as she opened the doors.  
A paramedic holding a chart in his hands climbed out of the ambulance and handed Meredith a chart. Her paramedic windbreaker jacket swooshed as she walked with Meredith. "Jane Doe, twenty-five year old female, trauma to the chest in a car accident. She was shot through the windshield. Multiple lacerations on her abdomen with third-degree burns."  
Meredith unwrapped the stethoscope around her neck and listened to the patient's heart. "She's bradycardic. Let's get her to Trauma One and stabilize her," she announced, gripping her fingers around the stretcher. Her interns followed on her heels and helped her rush the stretcher inside the hospital.  
"On my count of three, one, two, three," Meredith called out. At once, all of the interns helped her lift the patient onto the bed. A team of nurse practitioners began organizing the intravenous wires and injecting morphine into it.

Meredith took her hands and pressed them lightly against the patient's abdominal cavity, feeling for internal injuries. Then, she took a thin flashlight and quickly shined them into the patient's eyes. "Patient's pupils aren't reacting. What do we do?" she asked.

"Order a CT scan, find out if he has any cranial injuries," an intern responded.

"Good, get on that. Someone page Dr. Sloane!"

Meredith quickly unwrapped packets of gauze and began unfolding them, preparing to pad them onto the patients' superficial wounds. "Okay, we're going to stabilize you and get you into immediate surgery, okay? We're going to take good care of you."

The ECG monitor began to beep.

"BP's dropping ninety-nine over forty-five," an intern called out.

"What do we do?" Meredith asked. "What's your name?"

"Anne."

"Hi, Anne. He's crashing. What do you do?" Meredith asked, urging her to respond.

_For Chrissake, was I ever this clueless? _

She looked around frantically. "Get a crash cart in here, now!" she shouted.

She grabbed the paddles and rubbed them together, hovering them over the patient's body. "Charge to two-hundred. Clear!"

She shocked the patient, her body levitating into the air. Meredith watched the monitor. Still crashing.

"Charge to three-hundred. Clear!"

Anne looked up at Meredith. "He's not responding! I don't know…I don't know what to do," she stammered, looking at her desperately.

She was about to start crying. Meredith stared at her, waiting to see if Anne would eventually have a stroke of insight, and perhaps, recall one of the many basic things learned in the third year of medical school.

"Push in two of epi, set up for another charge," Meredith ordered, taking the defilibrator away from her. "Clear!"

The red dot just kept flashing, flashing with its red glare. Meredith stared. "Push in three rounds of atropine. Charge to two-hundred – clear!"

She shocked the patient again. Beads of sweat stuck to her forehead. She blew her bangs out of her face and pulled off her gloves. There was a long, pregnant pause. All Meredith could hear were the sounds of her heavy breathing. The interns looked at her, in a sense of pity, yet disappointment that their first case had resulted in death.

"Time of death, twenty-two, fifty-two."

The nurses filed out of the room in silence, while the interns removed their plastic gowns and shoved them into the sterile trash bin in the corner of the room. Meredith placed her hands on her hips and bent over, trying to steady her breathing. Suddenly, a woman burst into the room, searching it worriedly, her thin eyebrows arched upward.

"Where is she?" she demanded.

"Who are you?" Anne asked.

"Where's my sister? Oh God…oh God, oh God, Lauren, is that you? Lauren…Lauren, oh God, please no." The woman ran her fingers through the hair of our Jane Doe, Lauren, silently pleading under her breath, in short whispers that amounted to almost nothing.

Meredith found her hand on the woman's shoulder, lightly squeezing it. "We did everything we could."

The woman furiously shook her head, with such uncertainty yet so much determination, she looked about as hysterical as some of the patients admitted into the psychiatric ward. "No," she said. "No, no, no, no. You didn't do _everything_! My sister's a fighter, okay? She fights. She's fought death hundreds of times. And now you're telling me that she's dead? You have to revive her. She can do this. She can…she can get through this," she rambled, tears spilling down her ruddy cheeks.

All of the doctors in the room stood still, patiently waiting for the woman to calm herself, to mourn her sister's death. Meredith touched her hand to her stomach and waited for the nausea to pass.

"You want to know what the last words I said to Lauren were? You want to know what happened this morning? We fought about our parents, their divorce. So I tell her to go to hell. I told my own sister to go to hell, and I meant it. And now she's gone. She's gone, and the last thing she saw of me, was me, standing there in front of her, screaming in her face, telling her to go to hell."

Meredith watched as the objects in front of her blurred. She blinked away the tears and stared up at the lights on the ceiling for a brief moment, then focused back on the woman. "I know what you're going through," she started, her voice cracking. "I know this is hard. I'm not going to tell you that your sister lived a full life, because I didn't know her. And I'm not going to tell you that life goes on, because most of the time it feels like it doesn't. And I don't want to give you false hope. She knew you loved her though. Sisters - they know you better than anyone else. They love you no matter what the odds. The best you can do, for now, is say goodbye while she's still in front of you. And then after you leave this hospital, you can take it on from there, just one step at a time."

The woman looked up at Meredith with her wet eyes, hopeful.

"I'll be back in a couple minutes," Meredith said. She shoved the doors open and heard the interns calling out for her, but she didn't turn around. She opened the door to the supply closet and kneeled over, holding her hand to her warm forehead. She gasped for air, but she couldn't. Tears streamed down her face uncontrollably. She felt her airway constrict, constrict so much she felt as if she were in an enclosed, claustrophobic area pressing against her sides.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the door creak open. Derek Shepherd stood before her with Zola in his good arm. His hand was still in its cast, but its full heal would be any time soon.

Quickly, she wiped the tears from her eyes and forced a smile at Zola. _How could they come to this? Practically six years ago, Derek had been in this exact supply closet with her, stroking her head as she breathed into a paper bag after Ellis Grey's death. Now, their daughter, was situated in this room. It was an alternate déjà vu. _

"Hi, Zola!" she said, expanding her arm span as Zola ran into them. "How are you?" she asked, nuzzling her nose to hers.

Derek watched her with sad eyes. "Meredith," he said.

She put Zola down. She wrapped her tiny fingers around Meredith's and looked up at her father. "I'm fine," she said.

He looked at her dubiously, his hands stuffed in the pocket of his lab coat. "What happened?"

"I'm going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine," she affirmed, sniffing. She rubbed Zola's head. "Mommy's going to go back to work now, okay? She'll be home in time for dinner."

"Bye, Mommy," Zola said brightly.

Meredith redirected her attention towards Derek, staring into his eyes that could see right through her façade. "I'll be okay, okay?"

"Okay." As he stared straight ahead, she gave him a quick peck on the lips and returned to Lauren's sister.


	3. Chapter 3: Limbo

_This is a casino. You are in a limbo of slot machines, roulette, and poker. Gamble. Pull the lever, place your bet, hide your cards. Make a decision, choose a path, wear your mask. Try and fail, keep on betting, wait until you get it right. You're fixated. To be flawless, to be undefeated, to be a winner. Stack your chips, fool your opponent, put it all in. All or nothing. You can walk home empty-handed. You can walk home with a new bank deposit. Your call. Everything is your call. This is a casino. Gamble your choices, gamble your morals, gamble your future. Hope for the best. Make friends with the dealer. Go with your first instinct. _

Mark Sloan carefully lifted the skin graft and squinted into the magnifier, focusing with such intensity that Jackson had never seen before in his career in Plastics. Usually, Mark was nonchalant, quick to affirm every move. Today, he was distracted as ever, questioning each move, taking more and more time off the clock.  
"Dr. Avery, can you take over for me?" he suddenly said.  
Jackson looked at him quizzically, taking the blunt probe from his hand. "Is everything ok, Dr. Sloan?"  
Mark nodded and removed his scrub cap. "Everything's fine. You can take it from here." He gave him a quick wink and proceeded out the operating room. He hastily pulled off his gloves and tossed them into the trash can.  
He navigated his way downstairs into the lab, where an electronic dummy was set up for the interns. He sat erect, his eyes wide open. A couple of interns held needles in their hands, warily drawing blood from the dummy.  
"Dr. Sloan?"  
"Move!" Mark shouted. "Move!"  
Without so much as glancing at the interns, standing in utter perplexity, he found his fist flying towards the dummy's face.  
"Ow," the dummy said.  
Mark threw another punch, to the cheek, to the gut. The interns had silently filed out of the room. His veins pulsed with anger, flooding through him in such a rush he felt as if he were going to burst into pieces. His face grew disconcerted, flushed. He threw another punch. Another punch.  
"Ow," the dummy said. Artificial blood spilled from his mouth.  
"It should hurt, you son of a bitch!" Mark yelled. "It should hurt more than Lexie was hurt under that plane. It should hurt more than I how felt when you took her away from me!"  
Another punch. The ECG monitor began to crash.  
The sound of the monitor rang in his ears. With both hands, he took the tray, stacked with a box of surgical gloves and intravenous supplies, and tossed it across the room. Just as he was about to toss the pair of scissors, he heard a booming voice echo through the room.  
"Hey!"  
Callie Torres stood before him. In seconds, she charged across the room and grabbed onto him by the shoulder. He writhed in her grip, but eventually settled down. She wrapped her arms around him, forming a cocoon.  
He pinched his nose with his fingertips to suppress the tears. "Lexie's gone."  
"I know," Callie whispered.  
"Lexie is gone."  
"I know."  
She walked him to the table and sat him down. It was as though saying it out loud, multiple times, would somehow affirm her death. Affirm that this was not a dream or a hallucinogen effect, but rather, reality.  
"I told her we'd have kids. And siblings. For Sofia," Mark explained, staring blankly ahead.  
"Sofia would have liked that." Callie lifted her arm and began rubbing his back in tiny circles.  
He shoved his hands through his hair and bent over, resting his elbows on his knees. Suddenly, he felt her slap the back of his head.  
"Ow!" he protested.  
"Get up," she said cheerfully, clapping her hands as if he were a dog and would wag his tail at her beckon.  
His face scrunched up. "I'm in the middle of sulking, Callie. I'm not getting-"  
"Get off your ass, and _get up_," she said, pulling him upwards by the arm.  
His shoulder was practically dislocated. Ironically enough, Callie was the doctor who could also fix it. He stumbled forward and found his legs, though weak and limp, summoning the strength to stand straight.  
"You're dead," she said.  
"Huh?"  
"You're dead inside. I mean, you are not the Mark Sloan I met. By now, you would have slept with about ten nurses and you would be kicking-ass, though not as much as me, in a hardcore surgery."  
"Are you saying I should go sleep with a nurse?" he asked.  
She shook her head. "The point is – anytime you were sad, you tried. You tried to get over it. And now all I see you doing is giving all your surgeries to Avery and crying in the middle of work. Frankly, Mark, you're being a pussy. I think you're afraid of what life is going to be like when you move on, and you're upset that Lexie can't."  
"I'm not afraid of anything," he retorted.  
"It's been a month. I can't stand to see you sad like this. Just try, okay? Try for me. Go to the goddamn ER, get yourself a seriously injured patient, and kick ass in a fourteen-hour surgery. You fought a broken penis, you can sure as hell fight death."


End file.
